Tutorial: Using Live to drive Logic -- I could use proofreading, testing help

Hi all,

I've written a little scratchpad blog post to remind myself how I got Live to treat Logic essentially as a rewire slave (donning aspestos suit in preparation for flames). The process works fine for me now, but I've been looking at this writeup for so long I'm not sure I'm seeing all the mistakes I've made and would love it if a few of you ran through it and let me know about things I've goofed up.

Here's a link to the post -- http://www.haven2.com/index.php/archives/using-ableton-live-to-drive-logic-pro-x

And here's a little teaser to give you a sense of what's in the post -- the full post has lotsa pictures and narrative and is pretty long to post here.

Overview

The goal is to use MIDI coming from Live to control instruments in Logic, and get that audio back into Live. There are some interesting tricky bits, but this is where you're headed and this diagram may be all you need.

Resources

Here are links to two project files which you are welcome to try out as a template. They're set up to do 14 channels of audio and MIDI. Why not 16, you ask? Because this template includes a B3 organ instrument in Logic, which consumes 3 MIDI channels all by itself. The configuration steps to set up the environment are still required, but you should then be able to load these up as a starting point.

Zip archive of the Logic and Live templates

(I had to fiddle with file permissions -- let me know if you run into problems opening the files)

Here's a link to the Soundflower audio shim that you need to install to get sound back from Logic into Live

Soundflower: http://cycling74.com/products/soundflower/

Quick Checklist

After a few times through, this checklist may serve as a useful shorthand reminder of the steps that are required. It's basically a table of contents of the rest of the post.

Disconnect all external MIDI devices

Install Soundflower

Set up the IAC bus

Click the “Device is online” button

Optional: rename the port

Open Live first.

Configure Preferences in Live

Configure Audio Preferences in Live to recognize Soundflower as its audio input

Configure MIDI Preferences in Live to recognize the IAC Driver

Open a new or existing project in Live

Drag External Instruments into empty MIDI tracks

Configure the External Instrument MIDI output(s) to send it to Logic via the IAC driver

Configure the External Instrument’s Audio input to receive audio back from Logic

Open Logic

Configure global preferences in Logic

Un-tick “Control surface follows track selection” in Logic Pro > Control Surface > Preferences

Set the global Audio Output device to Soundflower

Open a new or existing Logic project

Set project-level configuration preferences (only required for multitrack work)

Select “Auto demix by channel if multitrack recording

Configure the project to only listen to MIDI from the IAC MIDI input

Open the Environment window

Select the “Click and ports” layer

Delete the connection between the “sum” and “input notes” objects

Create a connection between the inbound IAC MIDI port and the “input notes” object

Create or select Software Instrument track(s)

Assign MIDI channels to correspond with the MIDI-To settings in Live

Record-arm the track(s)

Switch back to Live

Test the configuration

Reestablish external MIDI controllers in Live

Oddities:

Assign B3 Organ instruments FIRST, and only to MIDI channels 1,2 and 3

Drummer tracks don’t respond to external MIDI

Debugging:

All channels sound in Logic if any channel is record-armed in Live

Two channels sound in Logic, the external-keyboard channel and the record-armed one

Instruments sound in Logic even if no Live tracks are record-armed

Instruments stop responding to MIDI as new channel strips are added in Logic

That's it for the teaser. The rest of the post expands on these topics.

Thanks in advance, and happy new year!

m